Will Hagel Spike the G.O.P.’s Fever?

President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary has added yet another intense political battle with Republicans to an already busy season for the White House. So how does Hagel fit in? During last year’s Presidential campaign, Barack Obama had a metaphor he often used to describe what needed to happen in Washington in order for his agenda to move forward in 2013. The election, he said, had to “break the fever” of the Republicans. The hope, frequently articulated by White House aides, was that once Obama was reëlected, the main incentive for G.O.P. obstructionism—trying to defeat Obama in 2012 and thus pursue a more favorable fiscal deal with Mitt Romney—would be removed. As a White House aide told me last year, “To get anything done in the second term, the President has to convince the Republican Party that obstructionism is a losing strategy.”

But Obama’s victory has made almost no difference in changing the psychology or incentives of the members of the G.O.P. who matter most: the House Republicans. The idea that a bloc of conservative, mostly Southern, Republicans would start to coöperate with the President on issues like tax policy and immigration may have rested on a faulty assumption.

The past few weeks of fiscal-cliff drama have taught us that “breaking the fever” was the wrong metaphor. There is no one event—even the election of a President—that can change a political party overnight. Congress is a co-equal branch of government, and House Republicans feel that they have as much of a mandate for their policies as Obama does for his. Shouldn’t House Republicans care that their views on Obama’s priorities, like tax cuts for the rich and immigration, helped cost Romney the White House and will make it difficult for their party’s nominee to win in 2016? In the abstract, many do, but that’s not enough to change the voting behavior of the average House Republican, who represents a gerrymandered and very conservative district.

A better metaphor for the coming battles with Congress may be what Woody Hayes, the college-football coach, famously called “three yards and a cloud of dust”: a series of grinding plays where small victories are earned only after lots of intense combat. While the fiscal-cliff showdown demonstrated that there’s potential for bipartisan deal-making in the Senate, passing any Obama priority through the House of Representatives is nearly impossible unless the political pressure is extremely intense.

The fiscal-cliff bill passed the House only when Speaker John Boehner’s members realized that their only alternative was blowing up the settlement negotiated by Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell—and accepting all the blame and consequences.

That episode offers the White House a general template for the coming fights over spending, immigration, and gun control—three issues where there is very little consensus between Obama and most House Republicans. Deals will have to be negotiated in the Senate and gain the imprimatur of some high-profile Republicans. Then a pressure campaign will have to be mounted to convince Boehner to move the legislation to the floor of the House under rules that allow it to pass with mostly Democratic votes. It’s easier to see how this could happen with the coming budgetary issues, which have deadlines that force action, than for the rest of Obama’s agenda, which is more likely than not to simply die in the House.

There simply isn’t much common ground between Obama and most House Republicans on the agenda he’s chosen. On every front, Obama is challenging the G.O.P.’s most intransigent interest groups. He’s taking on the anti-tax activists who have controlled Republican economic thinking for decades. He’s taking on the Republicans’ Tea Party base over immigration, an issue that polls (and the Republican Presidential primaries) have shown to be more intense than almost any other for grassroots conservatives. He’s taking on the previously untouchable National Rifle Association with his coming proposals to regulate firearms.

And with today’s nomination of Hagel, Obama will open a new front against Republican neoconservatives, who control foreign policy in the G.O.P. It’s doubtful that the votes to defeat Hagel will materialize in the Senate, but a President’s political capital, especially in a second term, depletes quickly after his election. Even if Obama prevails, the Hagel fight will have a cost to the rest of his agenda.

The past few weeks have made clear that none of these policy battles were settled by the election. If anything, Obama’s victory may have caused the fever to spike.

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty.

Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.